In 2018, the British historian Antony “Tony” Gerald Hopkins wrote a monumental imperial history of the United States called American Empire: A Global History. My review is based on the 2019 Princeton University Press paperback reprint edition (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de).
In his Preface, A. G. Hopkins states that the research for this book was triggered by 9/11 and is the fruit of several decades of accumulated knowledge from three diverse fields of history: his interest in globalization supplied the broad analytical context; his work on Western empires suggested how imperial expansion transmitted globalizing impulses; his research on the indigenous history of former colonial states has given me an awareness of the perspective from the other side.
According to the author, globalization and empires were interlinked throughout the three centuries covered by this study. Empires were both assertive innovators and agents of globalization. Impulses of expansion and contraction moved in unison; chains of cause and consequence ran in both directions.
In his Prologue, the author mentions that the war with Spain inaugurated a new phase in the history of American empire. The United States became a colonial power in Pacific and the Caribbean.
The Philippines
It’s impossible to sum up 1000 pages rich in details. Here instead some information about the small chapter regarding the Philippines, which A. G. Hopkins wrote with the help of valuable comments by William Clarence Smith.
Tony Hopkins remarks that although Spain had laid claim to the Philippines in 1521, it was not until the end of the 18th century that a serious effort was made to turn formal possession into effective control. Military operations and the spread of disease had reduced the population of the archipelago by more than 36% by 1600 and by an additional 20% by 1700. Spanish rule exacerbated the preexisting state of underpopulation and, therefore, reinforced the prevalence of subsistence and semi-subsistence cultivation, while scarcity of labour promoted slave-raiding and trading.
Outside Manila, the Friars were the most visible Spanish presence. They ruled indirectly with the Friars as its principal agents and harnessed indigenous authorities to collect taxes and supply labour. The burden on those it touched was sufficient to provoke substantial resistance. In an archipelago of abundant land, dense forest and inaccessible uplands, there was the option of escaping to regions that lay beyond the reach of Spanish officials. According to Tony Hopkins, all these expressions of protest, forged in the first two centuries of Spanish rule, were carried into the 19th and 20th centuries, when, tempered by time, they provided steely opposition to foreign rule.
Tony Hopkins writes that decentralization allowed strong provincial loyalties to develop and often to frustrate directions issued from the capital, Manila. A multiplicity of polities arose, ranging from small-scale, dispersed societies to larger segmentary or pyramidal states, some of which conducted regional and international trade with countries in East Asia. Tony Hopkings explains how immigrants from the Pacifc and South Asia introduced Hindu and Muslim cultures and founded polities headed by rajahs and sultans. To Spaniards, seeking to extend the frontier of the counter-Reformation to Asia, as to Americans trying later to convert the region to evangelical Protestantism, this was a world of heathens and false gods and a challenge to test the survival of even the fittest representatives of self-identifed superior civilizations. The Muslim south thought of itself as being besieged by the Catholic north; “states’ rights” became a cause that rallied the provinces against centralization— and still does.
Tony Hopkins underlines that Chinese immigrants had settled in the Philippines before the arrival of the Spanish. But in the 19th century, their numbers grew following the opening of trade opportunities and the removal of restrictions that had inhibited their activities. Chinese-Filipino mestizos were eager promoters of the concept of a Filipino identity that, through a process of ethnogenesis, eventually helped to create the Philippine nation.
In 1836, Manila’s overseas trade was liberalized. But elements of mercantilism remained in place. State monopolies continued, tariffs were levied on entries into Spain, etc. However, towards the end of the 19th century, Britain and its Asian possessions dominated the archipelago’s external trade and foreign investment; Spain was only in second, the USA were in third place.
In the Philippines, the telegraph was introduced in 1872, the steamship in 1873), submarine cable arrived in 1879, the telephone in 1890 and the railroad in 1892. The middle class rose and the influence of Manila and Madrid declined.
As the tax burden increased, resistance grew and collection costs rose. By the close of the 1870s, the monopoly had become unproductive and unworkable. In the 1880s, Madrid had no option but to implement far-reaching revenue reforms. The burden of domestic taxation shifted from the tribute system to assessments based on wealth, which in practice loaded the Chinese community with the highest rates.
The firm grip increased revenues from taxation but added opportunities for administrative corruption and arbitrary action. By the end of the 1890s, the burdens placed on the Philippines had brought the colony close to fiscal self-sufficiency, though at the cost of provoking militant opposition to Spanish rule. Tony Hopkins stresses that Spain’s fiscal problems intersected with the agrarian crisis that struck the Philippines in the late 19th century, as it did the colonial world as a whole.
After a long upswing, population growth slowed markedly during the last quarter of the century, mainly as a result of the spread of disease, which in turn was linked to poor nutrition. The 1880s were called the “decade of death” throughout the Philippines. The “health crisis” extended into the 1890s and into U.S. rule. Malaria, cholera, beriberi, dysentery and smallpox decimated the population; rinderpest, imported from Hong Kong and Indo-China, destroyed cattle stocks and contributed to the collapse of the rural economy. Tony Hopkins mentions as evidence for the extent of the problems that the average height of adult males did not regain levels achieved in the 1870s until the 1940s.
Unlike Cubans and Puerto Ricans, Filipinos were considered by the Spanish to be insufficiently civilized to deserve any form of self-government. Tony Hopkins underlines that deprivation and disappointment stoked the resistance movements that led to the rupture with Spain in the 1890s.
Chinese and Filipino mestizos, typically with Tagalog connections, formed the vanguard of the nationalist leadership in the Philippines. They pushed for land reform, in particular redistribution of the Friar lands. The mestizos resented the checks placed on their aspirations by peninsulares and criollos, who owed their superior positions to their ethnicity and place of birth. Tony Hopkins writes that their ambitions were larger than their economic interests. In the second half of the 19th century, they spawned an elite of self- styled ilustrados (“enlightened people”), who had been educated in Europe or had traveled there and had absorbed a range of political ideas, extending from liberal reform to
anarchism. Significant numbers of Filipino clergy also supported the nationalist movement.
The author writes that the ilustrados were the first to reconstruct an indigenous, pre-Hispanic culture and assert its superiority to Spanish values and customs. A globalized network of contacts linked resistance movements in the Philippines to Cuba and Europe. The result was a mix of often conflicting aspirations which ranged from militant anarchism to middle-class values, which harmonized with pacific liberalism.
Tony Hopkins writes that differences among elites were complicated by popular movements that developed outside the ranks of privileged and wealthy minorities. Support came from a broad range of urban and rural workers, women as well as men, including laborers, sharecroppers, and small tenant farmers. Their vision of the future expressed a syncretic mix of Christian and indigenous beliefs; their aim was to improve the position of the masses.
Low incomes, forced labor, land shortage, malnutrition, epidemics in the 1880s and 1890s and deteriorating living conditions pushed people to political protest while banditry, smuggling and cattle rustling proliferated. Coincidentally, the incidence of volcanic activity and earthquakes increased. When troops from the United States appeared, they were seen not as representatives of liberty, but as heralds of the Apocalypse. Established institutions lost credibility. Millenarian movements gained momentum.
Tony Hopkins notes that seen from a provincial perspective, national unity was a prospect that threatened to install Tagalog dominance. Regional autonomy was a more attractive and a more realistic ambition. Visayans did not recognize the First Philippine Republic when it was proclaimed in 1898. Mindanaoans, in the distant south, pursued their long-standing claim to be independent.
Tony Hopkins portrays the three leading figures in the nationalist movement: José Rizal, Andrés Bonifacio, and Emilio Aguinaldo. We cannot offer details here but, shortly before Rizal’s execution by the Spanish in 1896, armed rebellion against Spain started and gained momentum after it.
As for Aguinaldo, in May 1898, shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, he re-entered the fray with the encouragement of the United States, whose senior representatives, he claimed, asked for his support against Spain and assured him that the United States had no imperial designs on the islands. In June, Aguinaldo issued a declaration of independence and established a new government, the short-lived First Philippine Republic. Tony Hopkins stresses that, like his counterparts in Cuba, Aguinaldo was confident that he had the support of the United States. Like them, he too was to be disillusioned.
In July, the United States ceased cooperation with the nationalists, the declaration of independence remained unrecognized. In December 1898, the Philippines with its several thousand islands and seven million inhabitants were acquired by the United States under the terms of the Treaty of Paris in exchange for a payment of $20 million, which the Spanish government reluctantly accepted. The independent government of the Philippines was excluded from the Treaty of Paris. Former allies became ennemies.
Antony Hopkins stresses that, outside the Philippines, the battles that followed are barely known today, unlike the Cuban conflict which took place at the same time. The U.S. Army lost 379 men in the minor war with Spain and 4,234 in the major conflict with the Philippine Republic. The Liberation Army lost between 16,000 and 20,000 men. In addition, estimates for civilian losses range from 200,000 to 1 million people. In February 1899, the United States became a recognized imperial power, when the U.S. Senate ratified the Treaty of Paris.
At the beginning of a second chapter regarding the Philippines (pp. 607-632), mainly concentrating on the subsequent years until the Second World War, A. G. Hopkins notes that the generals of the U.S. Army who helped to expel Spain from the Philippines, and then suppressed the nationalist movement, shared with the civilian authorities who followed them an almost complete ignorance of the tasks they faced. President McKinley, so it was said, could not even locate the islands on the map.
These are just a few elements regarding the Philippines in a book that focuses on the global history of the United States from 1756 until 1959. You can also find chapters about exceptionalism, empires, globalization, the Glorius Revolution, from revolution to constitution, the Second War of Independence, deflation, imperialism, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawai‘i, wars of choice, the American Century, isolation, integration, lobbies and liberties, confused colonialism, postcolonial globalization, the aspiring hegemon, Captain America and dozens of other topics.
The historian A. G. Hopkins touches many subjects in this long-term study. If you want to dig deeper, use the long list of notes at the end of this monumental book, which is a valuable, critical contribution to the global history of the United States.
Antony Gerald Hopkins: American Empire: A Global History, reprint edition 2019, 982 pages. Princeton University Press. Order the book from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this book review of A. G. Hopkins: American Empire: A Global History are not between quotation marks.
Book review added on September 1, 2022 at 00:03 German time.
